


Midas

by ThereAreNoLines



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Clonecest, F/F, Ficlet, Guns, Incest, Mentions of Character Death, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:45:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThereAreNoLines/pseuds/ThereAreNoLines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pouring the wine comes as easily as pulling the trigger, but it’s less messy, and it tastes better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midas

The lock clicks. The motion light flickers and fades. It’s when the porch stays dark that Alison lets it all go.

She’s always been a person to hang on to things, tighter and tighter until she squeezes every ounce, every blood red drop of life out of them with her worthless, heavy hands. (At least she can say she never let them go – at least she can say she tried. That way, it won’t really be her fault.) She hangs onto the house, with her lungs burning and her eyes watering and her arms aching – she’ll scrub it until she scrubs it from existence. She hangs onto Donnie, but he snores and he sweats and he’s slipping out of her grasp faster than she can regroup and catch him again. She hangs onto her kids, and it makes her scared to touch them, to love them beyond perfunctory utterances and perhaps-a-little-too-harsh punishments, like it will somehow speed up the process until they’re dropping her off at the door to a nursing home and speeding away before someone catches them.

She’d hung onto Beth.

Pouring the wine comes as easily as pulling the trigger, but it’s less messy, and it tastes better. The stem of the glass breaks in her hand, and she laughs and laughs until she can’t breathe and the laughter collects in sobs in her throat. She presses her face to a pillow so they can slip out, and the wine is staining the carpet but she doesn’t care. She can’t. She’s let it all go.

The steam cleaner’s going to cost a fortune.

Alison eyes the gun through the clear curve of her second wine glass, more liquid sloshing over the edge, dripping down along her hand, red and sticky. The laughing comes back when she thinks that maybe that’s how Beth’s hands looked after. It’s hysterical, each sound dragging itself out of her mouth even though it hurts. She’s not there, but Alison can feel Beth’s hands. They’re nothing like hers, strong and capable – or at least they were. After feeling them, she never would have guessed that they were just like hers.

The gun is in her hands. But she’s not on her couch, with its twice redone upholstery. No, she’s at the gun range, and Beth is peeling back her ear protection, mouth practically pressed against her skin as she talks her through it.

Close your eyes, see the target in your head, picture it.

One hand on her hip as the other tucks her hair behind her ear, no-nonsense, steady decisive, a pillar of strength to her slowly crumbling ruins.

Count your heartbeats. Memorize the rhythm. The gun is just an extension of you.

There’s no rhythm, just an erratic mess. Her heart beats in her throat, she’s sure she can feel it. Her hand rests on her stomach now, the fabric riding up on her skin.

Take deep breaths. Lose yourself in them. Between heartbeats, exhale and pull the trigger.

She covers her ears again, and doesn’t jump when the gun goes off, doesn’t even let her go.

The gun is floating in the wine stain at her feet. One, two, three little white pills fall into the palm of her hand, her shaking, unreliable hand, and they barely make it into her waiting mouth, past her trembling lips. Beth was the strong one. Beth knew how to hold onto things without murdering them. Beth knew how to let things go when they got too much, instead of choking them. Beth was good, and strong, and solid, while she flickered and faded like a motion light.

Alison kicks the gun under the couch, and lets her face fall in her hands – she’s already ruined herself. That doesn’t matter. But she ruined Beth. She touched her, and she held her, and she broke and slipped away and withered and died just like everything else she left her fingerprints on.

If only she turned things solid gold instead.


End file.
